I am at the part where you need to decide to either side with the witch or the villagers, and the hellhound kills me every time. I am trying to side with the witch, because the villagers are racist so screw them.

My main problem is the stun effect the hellhound has, I don't know if its called "pain" or just what it is, but it dominates me. I have put spectre oil on my sword and have upgraded fast and group style a few times, so the green dogs are no problem. I usually stick close to the witch during the fight so she doesn't die, since she heals me. I have made it to the point where all the green dogs are dead, and the witch is alive, and its just me and the hellhound, but the hellhound stuns me and kills me every time. I should also mention that I have a tawny owl and swallow potion already going, I took them just before the cutscene, and I use ard to knock down the hellhound as much as possible but it just gets back up. I am playing on hard mode.

Not sure if it's possible at this point, but the willow potion protects against stun. You can brew potions even if you don't actually have the formula yet. It'll be unidentified until you drink it. Willow - The Witcher Wiki

I remember when doing that battle the one thing I did was basically run in circles. I found that I could run around in a large circle/square. This allowed me to heal while staying away from the battle. The key was to run along right near the edge without touching the fire, that will make things worse. So while doing that once healed I would go in and use aard (I think that is right, the one that knocks them down) and then attack. Then simply rinse and repeat.

I do recall it not being an easy fight and it took quite a bit of time to finish it.

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I found the only way to really be able to do it was to have spectre oil on my blade, and have both willow and blizzard potions consumed. Willow will help regenerate your health while Blizzard will slow down time allowing you to get more hits in as well as increase your dodge quite a bit. I was playing it on the hardest difficulty so if you are playing it on that or easier this should work for you

Thanks for the responses guys. Something else I haven't really figured out is how to know what ingredients make which potion. When I click on the formulas tab in the journal it shows what formulas I know (willow isn't there), but even then it just shows what catagory of ingrediant to use. It just says something like 2 parts aether and 1 part reubis. There are many ingrediants that are either an aether or a reubis, and I tried just randomly mixing something and it turned out to be poison. When you have all the ingredients for a potion on your list, you can click on it and it shows you then what goes in. Do I need to write it down on paper or what? And how do I figure out how to make willow? I checked that link and it says the book of the wolverine, but that appears to be at a later part of the game. The good news is that I went back to and older save and made myself the blizzard potion, so I have that now too.

But again, is it up to me to write things down so I know how to make a potion? Right now I can only see what is in a potion when I have all the ingredients for it, which does not help me when I am missing some ingredients.